Von Allan remembers the time he was 12 or 13 and his teacher at Glashan Public School began to lecture him about his poor attendance record.

“Some teacher was getting angry at me. I was missing a lot of classes. And I had literally, the night before, picked my mom up off the floor because she had passed out,” he said.

“That was one of the realizations that I had as a kid that this whole school-reality-marks thing is bulls—. My mom’s in trouble. That’s what I needed to do. If that meant I had to miss a day of school, who cares? I will get over it.”

The “trouble” Allan’s mother, Judith, faced was schizophrenia. It would be years before Allan, now a successful illustrator and graphic novelist, would come to terms with what it meant to grow up as the child of a parent with mental illness. There was violence — his mother would smash and throw things, though she never directed her anger at Allan — and there were psychotic episodes and stays in hospital. But for Allan, mental illness meant “crushing” poverty and an exhausted and bedridden mother.

“My biggest memories are not so much her having an episode, it was more constant, unrelenting fatigue and the inability for her to get out of bed,” he said. “I’d get home from school — mom’s in bed. I was on my own a lot.”

That feeling of aloneness is common to many children of the mentally ill. It was to help other kids going through the same experience that Allan agreed to be part of a documentary about growing up in a family with mental illness. The film, I Am Still Your Child, was written and directed by Megan Durnford and streams on the CBC website. It aired on CBC in Quebec last month and is expected to be broadcast nationally in January.

Allan’s parents separated when he was five. He and his mother moved to Ottawa from Arnprior and settled in a tiny apartment on Bell Street. At school, first Mutchmor and Glashan elementary schools, and later Glebe Collegiate, Allan rubbed shoulders with affluent classmates while he and his mom struggled to get by on his mother’s monthly social assistance cheque. He wore worn clothes and mismatched socks.

“I started to experience things like, ‘Wow. My life is not like these people’s lives,’ ” Allan said from his studio in the Vanier home he shares with his wife and their rescue husky, Corbin. “My mom was more absent. There were so many good days and bad days that she wasn’t as active in my life.”

Allan was a painfully shy, insecure kid. His mother’s schizophrenia — she had her first episode while pregnant with her only child — made her hallucinate and relive past trauma.

“I’d be watching TV and she’d come out and she’d be talking to herself. She’d say things like, “Did he do this? Why did he do this? He said you were ugly …’

“It was terrifying. I didn’t understand it, and that’s what made it so scary.”

Though she struggled with her illness, Allan said his mother never neglected him. He has happy memories of Christmases and other special events with his mom, who died in 1994 of a heart attack. She was just 48.

Von Allan has few pictures of him and his mother together. This one was taken when he was about 12. Judith Julien suffered from schizophrenia.

“She was trying the best she could, given her circumstances, to provide for me and to try to get herself healthy,” Allan said. “She was fighting. She hadn’t given up. It’s more like the illness won. It’s like cancer. Not everyone who fights cancer wins.”

Allan didn’t discover drawing until his mid-20s. It’s one of his great sadnesses that his mother didn’t live to see his art, or meet his wife.

He explored his unusual upbringing in one of his first graphic novels, The Road to God Knows, a fictionalized account of life with a schizophrenic mother. It was that book that caught the eye of filmmaker Durnford.

Allan, now 43, shares the story of his upbringing alongside two younger women, aged 19 and 20, who are also coping with a parent’s mental illness. One in five Canadians suffers from mental illness and 60 per cent of them have children. At the same time, there are few supports available for kids who are trying to cope. Allan was surprised by the feeling of understanding he shared with others who grew up like he did.

Von Allan tackled the issue of mental illness in his graphic novel The Road to God Knows.

“There are a lot more of us than I would have entertained. The emotional effect on you as a kid going through it and being in this weird situation of being a caregiver and a kid and feeling powerless to help — not even knowing how to help — I was caught by how much that unified us.”

Though the stigma around mental illness has lessened, there are still few resources available to help those who are ill and their families, he said. Allan is still bitter about how he and his mother were forced to scratch out an existence on his mother’s meagre benefits and about the lack of support she received.

“For my mom, there was nobody. I was a kid, 10, 11, 12, when my mom was going into The Royal Ottawa. She’s at her worst, and on top of it all, we’re scrounging money up to get prescriptions. At the best of times, these things can be hard to deal with. Then you throw mental illness in on top of it? Wham.

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